Gravity's Rainbow has taken science/speculative fiction beyond the genre's limits into metaphysics, metapsychology, and cosmology. Pynchon has accomplished this by questing at the innermost nature of homo sapiens and in so doing has called into serious question some of the basic and sanguine assumptions upon which contemporary notions of science fiction are founded.

First of all, Pynchon, in the Freudian tradition, is concerned with the dualism that is reflected in the designation of the species homo sapiens. For Pynchon, to quote the essence of Ernest Becker's commentary on "the psychoanalyst Kierkegaard": "The creatureliness is the terror." The consequence of man's condition—the dualism of self and body—is a fear and denial of death. (p. 368)

Additionally, Pynchon adopts Norman O. Brown's conception of history as neurosis. Brown notes that the maturation process of the human animal is unique in its prolongation of infancy and its postponement of...